Blue Musician
After wading through another snivel/drivel from Mr. [Alex] De Vore, all I can say is, ahhh, the Reporter! Worth every penny of the purchase price. Seriously, if the blues/rock bands are attracting an audience and the more creative bands De Vore prefers are not, perhaps that says more about his taste than that of the community. Trying to foist your taste on us does not constitute criticism.

If Corazón ultimately fails in its attempt to recreate the variety we knew at Club West, maybe it’s because times have changed. The kids who De Vore complains are absent from the music scene weren’t even born back then. The kids are plugged into their digital world; they can’t be bothered to learn to play an instrument. Meanwhile the bars are full of plump, middle-aged tourists who want to hear—you guessed it—blues/rock and classic rock. The bars hire the bands they can profit from. If they fail to do so, they go out of the live-music business.

The market determines what pays, not the critics or the bar owners.Dave Silva
Sandia Park

Newer Reviewer
I’d like to add my support to Marsha Winborn, who wrote about the “smallish point of view” of your film reviewers.

I would really appreciate—and I bet many of your readers would—a voice of maturity of both film AND life experience reviewing films in the future.

I have lived in Europe, studied French in school, have cooked from both The Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking since probably before most of your writers and readers were born, and I thoroughly enjoyed the film Julie & Julia. Having begun cooking seriously on a hot plate and with a toaster oven, in a one-room studio apartment while working two jobs and going to college full time and being married to a full-time student who also had to work while studying, I relished both the younger woman’s experience and the older one’s.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the scenes of French street shopping and the lovely places where Julia lived, as well as the clothes and hats! Reminded me so much of my early travels, and of my mother and her friends, who could not afford to dress that way except on rare occasion, but who did dress as well as they could, whether doing housework, going shopping or going to the movies, which was about as exciting as their lives got. There was a kind of proud stature about the women of those days that I miss and enjoyed seeing. The celebrations among friends showed neither snobbery nor any sense that the creators of the film only understand how to access fame. Isn’t this what we all actually do? Work hard, achieve a measure of success amidst the inevitable failures and share it all with our loved ones?

Please count me in on the vote for film reviewing with more “journalistic training and breadth of experience.”Ramona von Moritz
Santa Fe

Comprehension
What is going on over there at the Santa Fe Reporter? A newspaper that once was THE go-to source for cool in Santa Fe has lost its best writers to Pasatiempo and replaced them with interns who write sentences like this:
“The Missoula Oblongata, an experimental theater company based in Baltimore (an unexpected hub of the avant-garde), also contains multifarious multitudes of functions, but runs more in the direction of wildly innovative and bizarre theater."

I’m sure John Waters and Animal Collective (for the most mainstream of Baltimore’s avant-garde scene) would be surprised to hear their city is an “unexpected hub of avant-garde”. Unexpected to whom (aside from a college student who apparently has never heard of Google or traveled over state lines)? Baltimore is well-known for its avant-garde (especially when it comes to theater) scene. In fact, that’s pretty much what the city’s art scene IS!

And “multifarious multitudes of functions”? What does that even mean? The aliteration sounds nice but the words are empty.

Please Reporter, step it up and get someone in the know on your staff and stop embarrassing yourselves. Jamie Congrove
Santa Fe
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